Keywords: badges, badging, open badges.

What is it?

Badges are a way of celebrating achievement and showing progress. Badges may be awarded based on a variety of chosen criteria. 

Why use it?

Badges are especially useful for encouraging students to engage in tasks or activities that may not be credit bearing but still form and important part of developing their understand/ skills for the subject. 

Who can use it?

 Tutor or Course Administrators can create and set up badges in the course. 

Students can then collect badges by meetings the specified requirements. 

Before I start...

Remember to enable activity completion in the course settings to automatically assign badges when students complete an activity (e.g. post to a forum, gain at least 85% on a quiz, or complete a questionnaire).

If you want to make your own badge, then start by creating a badge image. You can design your own badge using any image editing software, but the easiest way is to either use an online badge creator tool (like Credly.com) to create a badge, or use one from a library of free badges.

1. Select a site to create your badge, or make it yourself using Photoshop or a similar graphics editing tool.
2. Once you have a badge you will need to save the image to your computer in order to upload it to Moodle.

How do I set it up in Moodle?

1. Log in to UCL Moodle.
2. Go to your course - you can request a test course from the Digital Education team if you want to try this out before using it with others.
3. In the Settings menu go to Course Administration > Badges
4. Click Add a new badge.
5. Fill in the following badge details:
   1. Name
   2. Description
   3. Image
6. Fill in the following issuer details:
   
   1. Name/Course name:
   2. Contact: noreply@ucl.ac.uk or your own email address
7. Fill in the following Badge expiry details:
   
   1. Expiry: what date or number of days after issue the badge expires - if testing you might like to choose an expiry so it disappears from user accounts automatically
   2. Click Create badge.
8. You will be taken to the Criteria tab.
9. From the drop-down menu choose to Add badge criteria
   1. Manual issue by role: all enroled users on the course with a certain role (e.g. student) will get that badge.
   2. Course completion: the student will need to have been marked as completing the course to get the badge.
   3. Activity completion: based on the student completing an activity
10. The next page will ask you to define which (any or all) of the added criteria need to be completed for the badge to be issued. 
11. At this point you can also choose to Enable a date the activity needs to be completed by in order to receive the badge (optional).
12. Click Save.
13. Click Enable access at the top of the page (above the tabs) to allow users to start receiving badges.
14. NOTE: As soon as you enable access and someone receives a badge you can not modify or retract it. However you can disable it to stop others receiving it. And duplicate it if you need to alter any settings.
15. Go to Course Administration > Badges > Manage badges and you will see the badge, the fact it is active and who has received it (click the number to see the names of the recipients).

Caution

- None at this time

Examples and case studies

• Badges can be used as criteria for other badges. For example, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced badges
• Cohorts can be used as criteria for badges.
  

Questions & Answers

- None at this time

Further information

Badge Creation Tools:

• Badge Studio: http://badgestudio.chicagosummeroflearning.org (doesn’t work in Safari) - for making badge images to distribute via UCL Moodle

• Cred.ly: cred.ly - for making and distributing badges

Free badge libraries:

• Moodlebadges.com (http://moodlebadges.com/?page_id=17)

Linking to your badges on other sites:

• Here's how to link to your badge on LinkedIn
• For Facebook, Googleplus and Twitter paste the link to your badge or collection into the post box
• For your website insert the iFrame code (in HTML view)